Halo? Is It PC You’re Looking For? Halo 5: Forge Is Out

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Forge! Huah! What is it good for? More than you might think. Halo 5: Forge has arrived free on Windows 10 and while it’s not full Halo 5 with the FPS’s campaign and all its multiplayer jazz and whatnot, it’s more than the level editor it initially seems. I mean, yes, it does have a level editor, but also it also supports 16-player online Halo action with the Arena multiplayer mode and player-made modes and minigames. Forge is a bit like a basic Garry’s Mod, and that’s no bad thing for a freebie.

So! Forge has a sandbox where you can slap down and piece together objects to build levels and fiddle with game logic using scripts. Creations are shared across the Windows 10 and Xbone versions, and played online by up to 16 people. Forge is also packing Halo 5’s Arena multiplayer mode with its maps. Here, have a gander:

What Forge doesn’t have is matchmaking. You’ll need to play through custom game lobbies, which makes it all fiddlier and a bit of pain to organise if you’re not playing with pals. You can’t find or join games that are already going either; that’ll come in a future update.

If you fancy a crack, Halo 5: Forge is out for Windows 10 in the Microsoft Store. (Or you might need to get it through this bundle if that doesn’t work?)

Now that Microsoft are bringing their big Xbone games to Windows 10 too, presumably the next Actual Proper Halo will come round our way too. I believe the whole thing’s about a surly uncle babysitting a sexy computer? The last Actual Proper Halo we got was Halo 2, though the (recently-cancelled) free-to-play Halo Online intended for Russia has been opened up and expanded by modders.

Remember how Microsoft originally called this Forge – Halo 5: Guardians Edition? What silly sausages!

I had the same thing, downloading the Anniversary Update allowed me to download Halo 5 then. Unless you’ve been keeping up with automatic updates it could be a 15+ GB download just for that onto of the 35GB for Halo 5 so don’t expect to be up and running right away unless you have uber fast internet, and set aside an hour or two for the update where you will not need your PC. I wish I had realized this ahead of time as I use my PC as a white noise generator but MS decided to finish installing the update at 4 in the morning and ruined my night and I never got to play Halo out of it (maybe tonight?)

I remember when Halo had a really great singleplayer/coop experience, perfect for couch gaming. Since MS has pretty much ripped that part out of the game, they might as well port the only remaining good qualities of the series to PC, since it fits more with the “style” of PC, sans LAN partying.

It had a great console LAN experience whose earlier renditions IMO have yet to be equaled and which is still going fairly strong though the emphasis has shifted heavily towards matchmade play with the graphics being too heavy for splitscreen and getting 8-16 xBox Ones together is not easy for many people.

Not that I would likely play Halo 5’s campaign in coop, as it’s by far the worst in the series (especially the absolutely dreadful “boss fights”), but the lack of the option is a huge slap in the face. Halo 1 is still immensely enjoyable to play with friends.

Disagree with which part? I could understand enjoying some of the campaign. The beginning was strong and I enjoyed both the writing and the gameplay. It pretty much stopped being any fun for me after you start running into WoW-Expy McInstaKill. The entire game just felt less mature than much of the prior material, which likely had to do with the sudden T rating.

I found it to be an incredibly epic campaign inexplicably ruined by one of the most mind-bogglingly bad design decisions I’ve ever seen, and I’m sure you know exactly what I mean on the latter…someone really high up in 343/Microsoft must have been REALLY attached to that enemy.

I pretty much had to slog through the game once Pretentious Skullface showed up. The gameplay was ruined and the story just became a massive wankfest that I couldn’t take even remotely seriously any more. In my mind, it was even worse than Halo 3’s writing. By the time they had you fighting four of them at once, I was about ready to just stop playing.

I have a handful of friends with whom I’ve been lucky enough to play every Halo game in co-op; we played Halo 5 start to finish in co-op, and it was substantially more engaging and fun than all of the times that I’ve tried it in singleplayer. In co-op the fireteam AI is spectacularly stupid, in singleplayer it’s… well, it’s not great. We only sort of paid attention to the story, which as soon as Warden Eternal shows up the second time starts being totally absurd. That third time was bs, I do agree there. Even in co-op that boss battle was shit. We were playing on Heroic, and reset the checkpoint a lot. Halo 5 plays better, but Halo 4 had a better campaign.

I really wish that Halo: Reach ran better on the Xbox One, because that had the best campaign in the series.

Halo 1 is fun only for nostalgia, and only because of the anniversary update. Don’t let me spoil your fun though!

Interesting. I figured the actual coop experience would have been roughly as you described it. But yeah, that design decision entirely ruined the game for me, both on a gameplay and as a catalyst for the quickly plummeting quality of writing. I’d play everything up to that part happily.

I actually really miss the sense of mystery and vastness in the original trilogy. (Though 2 and 3 were nowhere near as compelling as the first to me.) Once the curtains started peeling back on the history of the Forerunners and whatnot, the entire universe just felt so much smaller.

And no worries. We all have different opinions. I enjoy hearing what other people have to say, as long as they’re respectful. Cheers!

Actually, on further thought, I can definitely get behind Reach being a superb game. It made the Covenant a threatening enemy again and expanded the universe without doing what…. well, what 343 has been doing to it.

What really ruined Halo 5 for me was that the servers that run multiplayer seem to all be on the west coast or the east coast. I’m in a major city in MST, and inexplicably my ping is always upwards of 50ms on Halo 5, whereas for games like Destiny and Titanfall it’s usually single digits to mid 20ms. Really ruins the game when my everyday experience is laggy connections. If it were like that in the other games that I play, I’d be happy to blame and troubleshoot my connection, but it’s only Halo 5. So… blech. And the lack of custom Firefight. Spartan Ops was great too, and that’s missing. Oh well.

They’re just basically practicing, since they haven’t been doing this for a while. I find that admirable. Going forward it seems they intent to release full versions of all/most of their future first party games, including the next Forza and Halo.

Not sure what the actual numbers for Win 10 are, but I’m not switching just for this game! Good to see Microsoft removing itself from the FPS competition on older platforms – makes space for other studios and other systems perhaps.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never be able to install another Microsoft product unless I somehow get the money to buy a separate computer for it that never touches the internet. I’m not letting that spyware anywhere near my main machine.